Hi, I’m currently looking at getting a drone for creating prescription maps for spraying. Main use would be green on brown in summer fallow and stubbles. Is best practice still to use a multi spectral camera ie m3m or is a RGB high resolution camera better to use now. Will need to map 4000ha once around Jan and a couple of other times throughout the year. Are there any recommendations for better set ups than an mavic 3 multispectral. Thanks in advance
No, the Mavic 3 Multispectral is your best option.
The M3M is the way to go. You might want to have 2 going at once for that amount of land. I get about 300ha a day done with one of them. That’s flying at 60m height. Picks up nearly all weeds except small grasses that have just come through the ground.
I tried a 61MP RGB camera and it was absolutely terrible for detecting weeds in stubble. Almost unusable. I’m still trying to get rid of it.
Thanks for the replies. Looks like the m3m is the best way to go.
I will also consider a vtol as I have a bit of flying experience with both drones and fixed wings and a wing could cover a lot more ha. I’ve looked at the wingtra but the price is a bit high for my initial foray into mapping
Are there any recommended multispectral cameras to add as a payload?
Thanks again
I don’t have much experience with Wingtra but I’d say for your first time mapping you’d want to keep things as simple as possible and DJI is pretty good for that. Everything is easy as.
And if you’re adding another camera payload to the drone you need to make sure it can add the RTK location data to each photo as it’s flying. Otherwise you have to mess around with PPK afterwards and it’s a pain in the arse and pretty inaccurate.
Why was the 61mp unusable? Too much detail?
No, RGB just isn’t good at differentiating between weeds and bare dirt, stubble.
Didn’t matter what index I used I couldn’t get it to pick up the smaller weeds without it getting false positives from things like shadows in the sprayer tracks, shadows from wheat stubble. Even at 1cm/px it still wouldn’t work well.
Once I changed to the multispectral drone I had no problems at all. Works perfectly.